Sinwar, the Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, is widely regarded in Israel as the architect of the Oct. 7 attack that sparked the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip, the Times of Israel notes. The Israeli military dropped leaflets in Gaza offering a $400,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. Western sources call Sinwar a more hardline figure toward Israel than previous Hamas leaders, including military ones.
Last year, Michael Kubi, who as an officer in Israel’s Shin Bet internal security service interrogated Sinwar for more than 150 hours while he was held in Israeli prisons, provided details about him in an interview with ABC News. Kubi recalled Sinwar as a “tough” and emotionless person, but “not a psychopath.” “He was a different kind of detainee,” said a former Shin Bet official.
In 1989, an Israeli court sentenced Sinwar to four life terms for his role in the murder of suspected Palestinian informants and the plot to kill two Israeli soldiers. Sinwar spent the next 22 years in prison and was one of more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners released in 2011 in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been held hostage by Hamas for five years.
At the time of his imprisonment, Sinwar headed Hamas’s internal security unit, Al-Majd, and according to Israeli and Palestinian sources, his job was to investigate Hamas members who were potentially collaborating with the Israelis. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in early December last year that his discovery was “just a matter of time.” Israeli military leaders described Sinwar as a “dead man walking.”
Sinwar’s exact whereabouts, however, remain unknown, and he did not become a “dead man,” as Netanyahu and his military would not have wanted. And he was given a key position in the Palestinian group at the time of the next round of confrontation in the Middle East. Unlike Haniyeh, who lived in exile in Qatar for years, Sinwar remained in Gaza, the Associated Press notes. As Hamas’s leader in the Gaza Strip since 2017, he has rarely appeared in public but has ruled the group in the enclave with an iron fist. Close to Hamas’s military leader, Mohammed Deif, and the armed wing known as the Qassam Brigades, he worked to strengthen the group’s military capabilities. He is believed to still be hiding in Hamas’s vast network of tunnels beneath the Gaza Strip.
